Coffee With Neighborhood Joes
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times
Late on a Saturday morning, a small flock of retired longshoremen settled around the low tables of D’Amico’s. A young woman with earbuds sat focused on her laptop as the old-timers took their seats around her, boxing her into a corner next to an enormous, gleaming coffee roaster. The old-timers bickered and dissected the day’s tabloids, cheerfully criticizing one another in vanishing Brooklyn vernacular. Occasionally, Frank or Tony would nudge the young woman for an opinion: “Is this guy nuts or what?” She would momentarily remove an earbud and nod, then go back online. Augie, a neighborhood electrician, punctuated the din with the stamping of coffee bags.
“Augie is a customer,” said Joan D’Amico, a co-owner of the Carroll Gardens coffee shop with her husband, Frank Jr., “but he’s not allowed to just sit here. We have to put him to work.”
D’Amico’s offers a rare equilibrium of old and new Brooklyn. The old-timers, who include Frank Sr. — the store’s owner until he passed it on to his son, in 1998 — are happy to chat with the younger customers bearing computers or strollers.
Like any number of small cafes along Court Street, D’Amico Coffee Roasters (at 309) brews six varieties of coffee each day and serves small meals and espresso beverages. But coffee roasting is the centerpiece of the business, which also has a wholesale outfit in Red Hook. Until recently, D’Amico’s was also a grocery store and deli, one of several mom-and-pop businesses in Carroll Gardens. “We’ve been roasting since Day 1,” Ms. D’Amico said. That wasn’t a problem for 64 years until, all of a sudden, it was.
One winter day a few years ago, a neighbor called 311 to complain about the smell of coffee roasting. (It should be noted that although freshly ground coffee smells like heaven, freshly roasting beans do not.) Agents from the city’s Department of Environmental Protection paid a visit. “We thought we were grandfathered in,” said Mr. D’Amico, who was told by an inspector that there was no such thing. A sign went up in the window: “O.K. you can stop calling D.E.P. and the Fire Department — we got your message.” The D’Amicos bought an afterburner to mitigate the smell, but it sat in storage while they tried to figure out how to fit it into the store. Then, the old roaster caught fire. It was clear that the time had come to acknowledge a changing neighborhood, and adjust the model. They closed for two months to renovate.
The old-timers, undeterred, installed themselves outside. “They’d get coffee across the street, and just sit out front,” Ms. D’Amico said. When loyal customers expressed horror that the business had been sold, the old-timers would set them straight. While Carroll Gardens, like much of brownstone Brooklyn, has been boutiquefied and bistroized, D’Amico’s has endured in part by keeping its old-school bona fides, which appeal to the hipster crowds, who revere all things vintage and connoisseurial, and the older generation, who like things the way they should be. And so the renovations carried some risk.
“There’s no way we can recreate this,” Mr. D’Amico said, speaking in front of a wall of photographs that show the store through the years. There’s a prominent portrait of Emanuele D’Amico, Frank Jr.’s grandfather, who established the business in 1948. Through all of the updates, a cozy atmosphere prevails. “That’s what we wanted to keep.”
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